Style

role models, refusal, material hauntings, memory-traps,

Angela McRobbie describes post-punk second-hand style as anti-nostalgia, “marked out by a knowingness, a wilful anarchy and an irrespressible optimism [that] gestures back to childhood rummaging through a theatrical wardrobe and the sublime pleasure of ‘dressing up.’” 

Teenage me drew inspiration from Sasha in Alison Prince’s Goodbye Summer. She’s a working class girl who dyes her hair pink and starts going out with a bit of rough who rides a motorbike and calls her ‘Lolly-top”. Sasha despairs over her parent’s loveless marriage, and frets about her future. She wants to be a fashion designer like Zandra Rhodes, but instead has to work in a shoe store. The horror! I loved her dreaminess and her determination, her Ninotchka tops, her pink hair tied up with scarves, her bedroom sessions with worldly Liz, where they burn incense and play old gramophone records, pretend they were never children.

A list of remembered 1980s op-shop purchases. 

 - Blue mohair cardigan

 - plum velvet shift with sequin trim

 - ‘topographical’ skirt: velour-and-voile contours over a brown satine slip

 - orange paisley men’s pyjama pants  

 - men’s long-johns dyed pink, dyed black 

 - white Pelaco shirt, worn with sleeves rolled and collar popped

 - green 1950s skirt, pleated, illustrated with a forest scene

 - fake mink fur stole

- old school shoes, laced up 

 - boots by Rocco of Malvern (You’d go in there with an idea and he’d draw around your foot on a piece of cardboard; a couple of weeks later you’d have a pair of Renaissance knee-high lace-up black suede boots, or a Chelsea boot like Bob Dylan wore when he went electric.)

Those were some boots. That was some stole. Those were some hot rollers tied up in an op-art headscarf.

In the 1980s Alannah Hill was shop-girl supreme at Indigo on Chapel St - she was a friend of a friend’s sister and I was fascinated by her look - kewpie-doll face and bird’s nest hair. In the video below she talks about growing up poor in Tasmania, and feeling transformed when she one day wrapped a lace curtain around herself. She left with eight suitcases and fifty dollars in her pocket - how I love these origin stories of bold originals! Later, when she had her own shop it was rumoured that staff had to reapply their lipstic every half hour.

At Camberwell market I’d sometimes see a woman with wild red locks and tattoos on her face. This was artist Vali Myers, very late of Box Hill; she was still a teenager when she ran away to Paris in 1949 to dance and be a proto-beatnik. She lived at the Chelsea Hotel, where she gave Patti Smith a lightning bolt tattoo. For many years she lived in Positano, with her poet partner and a menagerie of animals. When she came back to Melbourne she was surprised and pleased to see it had changed from the conservative place she had once escaped, and with its vibrant arts culture, International outlook, cafes and laneways etc, it felt like a place she could die. Vali was not afraid of death. (There’s a new biography of Vali Myers just out - Can’t wait.)

Mike Brake defines the three elements of style as:

a) ‘Image’, appearance composed of costume, accessories such as hair-style, jewellery and artefacts;

b) ‘Demeanor’, made up of expression, gait and posture. Roughly this is what the actors wear and how they wear it;

c) ‘Argot’, a special vocabulary and how it is delivered. 

Dick Hebdige claims style as a form of resistance, “a gesture of defiance or contempt, in a smile or a sneer […] a refusal.“ Re: the aforementioned orange pyjama pants. I wore them on a Year Nine school excursion - very early in the term at this new school where no one knew me. The activity was rock-climbing/abseiling. I remember only that it was too hot, I couldn’t cope with the way the pants looked all bunched up in the harness, and I refused to participate.

I think I only had style for a short while, and it was mostly imaginary, borrowed, projected. But clothes are such memory-traps. We wear them on our body, they become part of our identity, we leave our traces on them. They remind us of past selves … even that list above felt like a kind of haunting.

Years and clothes blur into each other. As if the start of the eighties was not vastly different to the end. I wore the pj pants at fourteen, the Rocco boots at nineteen- I couldn’t have afforded them before my post-school my working girl days, cash in a small yellow envelope every Thursday. Someone called me a baby butch so I was moving away from men’s shirts and towards long, flowing Ishka skirts with bells on them.